Do your best to keep stuff like Camp Rock out of your house, but if you can’t, you have my sympathies. Not that it will make any difference to your tween daughter who is on her way to making sure this gets a sequel in 2009. I’ve never been a big fan of this type of product, but this is really scraping the bottom of the barrel. Kenny Ortega really makes these things look easier than they obviously are. The production numbers lack any sort of flair and seem a bit lifeless. Unlike HSM, this movie does not include actors breaking into song in kitchens, cafeterias and basketball gyms, everyone who sings is either “performing” in a show or rehearsing. In fact, they are often boring and not helped at all by the uninspired and sometimes messy choreography and staging. Despite the presence of the Jonas Brothers and what must have been access to some good songwriters, none of the tunes are memorable. The bad acting is not the place where Camp Rock really falls short of HSM, though, it’s in the music.

Mitchie tells everyone she’s wealthy and keeps the fact that she also has to work in the kitchen to help her mom until it, shockingly, comes out, and at the worst possible moment! Mitchie also meets up with Shane who doesn’t realize she’s also the one he heard singing when he first arrived and is searching for. Mitchie gets to Camp Rock and runs into brainy and nice Caitlyn (Alyson Stoner) whom she immediately dumps to join the clique of rich wench Tess (Meaghan Jette Martin). Huh? Anyway, they are your Troy and Gabriella for this little 98-minute cliché fest. Meanwhile, Shane Gray (Joe Jonas of the Jonas Brothers) is told by his band mates in the hot rock band, Connect 3 (Nick and Kevin Jonas) that he needs to live and work with his uncle at Camp Rock to make up for some bad behavior on their current tour. Fortunately, and isn’t this a coinkidink, her mom (Maria Canals-Barrera) is hired to cater at the camp and now Mitchie can go at a reduced rate.

Mitchie Torres (Demi Lovato) wants more than anything else to go to Camp Rock for the summer, but her family is too middle class to afford the tuition. It just does everything at a much, much lower level. Camp Rock doesn’t stray particularly far from the HSM formula.

Camp rock 1 we rock